A semantic network is a network that represents semantic relations among terms (e.g., concepts). A semantic network may be used as a form of knowledge representation, and therefore may be used to model business knowledge in companies and their various parts, for example, as enterprise knowledge and/or terminology.
Knowledge may be organized and belong to the same knowledge area or expertise area, for example: IT, finance, etc. The knowledge area or expertise area may be grouped into knowledge domains and may be used to specify the context of the required information and therefore deliver data with better quality. Typically the business knowledge and the terminology used are distributed throughout the entire company, experts within the company, management heads, and large volumes of documents, etc.
Modern business applications are built from business objects that group or encapsulate the definition of relevant business information. A business object structural model may contain one root node and zero to many business object nodes. The node's hierarchy (i.e., tree) may be built using associations between business object nodes that group semantically related attributes. Additionally, each attribute may be structurally defined by an underlying global data type—so-called element data type or global data type (centrally defined data type). Finally, the instances of business objects provide business-related terminology, e.g. a material business object provides the definition of material and the material names used and defined in a particular company.
Business-related terminology may evolve over time with new business trends, changing or discontinued product-lines, new technology, or any of a number of business, economic, social, and/or technology related changes. Given the ever-changing nature of business-related terminology, what is needed are controls for a semantic network that will adapt with usage to provide for better user/user-group-oriented interaction with the semantic network.